The very first illustration [. . .] is a
photograph of a broken egg cup recently unearthed in the garden of her
childhood home, Steventon Rectory. ‘It’s not impossible’, reads the caption,
‘that Jane Austen once used it to eat a boiled egg.’ Well no, not impossible,
but…

After further consideration, Lethbridge
concludes:

There’s much intriguing historical detail but
also quite a lot of padding (‘imagine Jane happy, if you will, life before her,
running through the Hampshire fields on a summer evening’), occasionally
intercut with questions guaranteed to wake up the snoozing telly viewer. ‘Did
Jane ever have lesbian sex?’ is one. The answer, unsurprisingly, is probably
not.

Speaking of Private
Eye, in the 14 July issue (not online) Remote Controller reviewed ITV’s Love Island, a reality show “in which
all the narrative tension comes from who will shag whom, and whether it will be
before the first or second commercial break”:

What has shocked ITV is that a franchise aimed at
a target audience whose average evening involves four neck-tattoos and necking
eight Jägerbombs has scored highly with viewers keener on fair-trade nail
varnish and organic Sav Blanc. Eng Lit graduates will find that Love Island most resembles a porn movie
based on the novels of Iris Murdoch, with names uncommon at the font
bewilderingly swapped: “Theo said to Tyla that Montana said to Theo…”

Meanwhile, in America, Kat Rosenfeld exposes The
Toxic Drama on YA Twitter for Vulture. It is an extraordinary, long, thoroughly
investigated account of online book reviews used as bullying – passed on by
people who condemn the book in question without reading it – and the chilling effect
this has on authors. I had not heard of YA Twitter, which:

regularly identifies and denounces books for
being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that
engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other
marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches
when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of
thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second
nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature
in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about
reading.

According to Rosenfeld, such campaigns involving
thousands of people tweeting and retweeting and Tumblring and the rest:

are almost always waged in the name of protecting
vulnerable teens from dangerous ideas. These books, it’s claimed, are hurting
children.But a growing number of critics say the
draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing
dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former diversity
advocate described why she no longer takes part: “I have never seen social
interaction this fucked up,” she wrote in an email. “And I’ve been in prison.”